Football Season Is Here!

The same day my alma mater Purdue Boilermakers exited from the NCAA Basketball Tournament also marked the beginning of Football season. No, not soccer (known as "Fußball" in these parts), that's been going on for months--including a brief winter break, European soccer season runs roughly from August to May!! Not American football either; I haven't cared about the NFL for over a decade, and my beloved college football season won't begin for another, let's see... 155 days. Nope, it's time for Australian Rules Football, known to many in that nickname-crazy country down under simply as "Footy," where it is massively popular-- crowds of over 90,000 to watch the matches are fairly common. I got hooked on this sport years ago when it was still on cable TV's Fox Soccer Channel-- the skill and athleticism required for the game is simply not to be believed. Far from being a bunch of muscle-bound goons, today's footy players have to run like soccer players, punt like the NFL, move the ball around in team formation like basketball, and... hit like a muscle-bound goon, yet with no padding. While Footy may look like rugby to some, it's a completely different game and skill set required. The problem for me lies in viewing the games-- although Footy is being broadcast more and more in the USA, it's still a fairly exotic sport here, televised once a week and relegated to a minor channel only carried in sports bars... who are too busy airing soccer. There is an amateur team in Munich, and we plan on going down to catch a couple games down there with our rugby snob friends. In the meantime, check out this masterful video-- there's really nothing else like Footy. Oh, and that jump that occurs at roughly the :44 point of the video isn't some CGI magic-- that's a standard maneuver called "marking" that occurs fairly regularly in matches. Crikey!